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The role of Requirements in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Requirements come in a variety of forms and level of details. Well defined and thought out requirements have demonstrated time and time again to reduce development time, increase quality and lower the cost of a software project. Projects that lack specific requirements quickly fall into many of the typical traps of project failure.

In this era of agile, mobile and ever faster-paced world of today, some teams question whether managing requirements are still relevant today. Well I say teams still need to know what they are supposed to do. The developer may have ideas but in order to deliver something useful there must be a consensus on functionality and needs. And they need more than just a general idea scribbled on a sticky note, but specifically exactly what does the business and customer expect. Developers should not be expected to fill in the gaps with assumptions. Clear definitions of requirements actually accelerate the development process by reducing uncertainty and wasteful work.

Another point of view argues that requirements only have to be defined once at the start of a project , and not worry about them again during development. Sure you could consider that approach but then we quickly realize that change is all around us. There is no way we can ever realistically say the requirements are "done". Requirements are continually evolving even as development is underway and therefore the team needs to stay attuned and make adjustments along the way. Otherwise the risk is that the end result although matching up to the original requests, fails to meet the business need upon delivery. The only way to address this effectively is to realize that requirements are an intricate part of the lifecycle that continually evolve with the business and that the delivery team needs to be in sync to deliver these expected results.

To ensure requirements are written for the entire lifecycle it is important to realize that business needs come in many different forms, formats and language. Bringing them all together in a single place, removing redundancy, and connecting interrelated content is the first step to requirements definition and management. Capturing your stakeholder and user requirements is only the first step in realizing your project. As your project progresses and evolves, these initial requirements give rise to other requirements which elaborate, satisfy, and verify them. The result is a web of interdependent artifacts and relationships which represent the nature of the dependencies between these artifacts. Navigating and understanding this web of information is critical to the success of your project. Each stakeholder in a project may be interested in different information (e.g. defect backlog, current tasks, or release schedule). What helps here is a customizable dashboard displaying all the information stakeholders, developers and testers need at any time. As a new project is started and progresses forward many of requirements you define and capture will change, be added to, or sometimes removed through the course of development. You need the capability to track requirements information changes so that you can understand what has taken place throughout that process.

In summary I want to remind business analysts and the rest of the software delivery teams, that in this fast-paced delivery environment today, requirements are more important than ever. They provide the roadmap of exactly what is expected of the team by the business and customers. Everyone on the team needs to appreciate that requirements are never final and that they naturally evolve with the market and business. Teams that can capture evolving requirements and implement them in a rapid and iterative fashion will find a competitive edge in the market. Automating requirements provides the additional key benefit of traceability and collaboration to identify gaps and the impact of changes while facilitating the engagement of experts on the team to improve the quality of results.